18 comments

@Atlassian: Same problem here with the Confluence Cloud! Page tree in the sidebar navigation is gone! Also the option to configure the sidebar! Why the hell do you need to do this sh*t on a productive system!!!!!?

We did not sign up to used as test subjects. The application is changing so much it is causing a lot of problems. The changes are analagous to the SEND button on your email changing location every day - yesterday its on the top of the page. today its on a sub menu, tomorrow its on the bottom of the page. Not cool at all.

Unfortunately, you did sign up for it. It's a monumental pain at times, and I'd love to have Cloud be more stable, with at the very least some warning of the bigger front-end changes (I wouldn't expect to be warned of changes orfixes that change icons slightly, move a button a few pixels or correcting spelling mistakes etc, but re-arranging the interface definitely should throw a warning)

But it is in the agreement you signed up for.

We do find that stability of the interface is one reason some people ask us to help them move to Server.

Moving to server to achieve stability is a horrible endorsement of cloud hosting that companies pay for.

I can run Jira+Confluence on the cloud with a non-technical manager guy (me) as admin, or buy a server and pay someone to maintain the installation solely to prevent random features from breaking or UI elements from moving around willy-nilly?

Agile can be controlled if managed properly. The problem is that Atlassian, like so many other developers, do not actually understand how to do this, and so get the best customer experience out of it as well. I hesitate to say that they don't care. They just have serious priority setting and management issues.

Once upon a time I liked Confluence. It's getting to the stage where the sloppiness-caused bugs just are an irritant--apart from really slamming down on productivity. SOme of their recent changes had subtle effects that will cost me a full day's work to fix; and even then I'm not sure anymore whetrher they're not going to muck around with my fixes next time around, so that all that fixing work was for nothing.

Was the question for me? I assume yes. Two biggest pain points are (a) when one clicks on Confluence logo - one is taken to Confluence dashboard and NOT to what you set up as home and (b) when you click on the space name (in breadcrumbs), you are taken to "pages" and NOT the overview page. Pretty bad. One minor grouse is I see big blank space (a few lines worth) in the beginning (top portion) of pages for no reason.

@Abhay PatilYes, the question was for you – thank you for answering it. My pains are quite different: Loading the page tree is much slower than it used to be with the old UI, and often the page tree does not unfold to show the position of a page in hierarchy when you open that page via full text search. Do you have these issues as well?

I have opted out! I don't feel like going back to the new navigation. (I hope you too have that option.) It is so un-atlassian for them to spring this new navigation on us - very clearly sans any acceptance testing. But mercifully one can opt out to stay with the older interface.

I don't know who redesigned the new interface, but he/she/they arte a bunch of clueless whatevers.

About the only thing I like is the font changes.

Every now and then I get an email asking whether I would recommend Confluence to anyone else. My answers keep progressing toward the 'no' end. If the people I contract for right now hadn't committed to it, I'd recommend finding something else.

Till, you can click on your picture on the left bottom corner and then one of the options would say "opt out". Interestingly, the UX designers of Atlassian have not made it intuitive by telling opt out of what - but it is about opting out of the new navigation.

@Till NoeverBut you can only opt-out of the new UI if you are coming from the old UI. If you have created your Confluence instance only recently, it probably had the new UI already, and then you can't go back.

Just in case someone else is wondering: Click on your profile picture in the lower left corner to open the menu. On top you should have a section called «New Confluence Experience» or something like that. There you can deactivate the new Confluence UI – at least temporarily, since I just got a notification that it will we reactivated soon!

@Ann WorleyI know that there is a page tree in the new UI as well. But – as your explanation demonstrates very well – it is hidden and requires an extra click. And it's not the same page tree anymore: It takes more time to load, it consumes more screen space, and quite often it does not unfold correctly.

For all these reasons I simply want to keep the current UI. Why does Atlassian force us to use the new UI? Let us choose ourselves which UI suits us best!

I won't repeat all the points I made there, but bottom line is we hate the "new Confluence experience".

The announcement pop-up on login to Cloud indicates that the "opt out" will be deprecated next week...

Fortunately for us our flight mission-critical site is self-hosted so we'll just never update it. Atlassian and the 3rd party plugin vendors we use will all loose the 'maintenance' revenue stream since there will be no reason to keep paying.

Confluence would be very, very difficult to replace since it's so bloody capable and useful, especially when augmented with a variety of plugins (Comala Workflows, Draw.io in particular) and used with JIRA. But I'll be looking for alternatives - and I've been the Atlassian champion in our organization for years.

Atlassian has done something unthinkable. They have rebranded a bug as a feature and closed it with resolution = "Won't fix"! Confluence had (or still has, in old navigation) a simple yet immensely useful feature where a user could setup an overview of a space that they normally work in as their home page. However, this feature stopped working in the "new experience". A bug was duly filed. And, lo and behold, it has been declared a feature. Check the link: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-56727

Although it may be futile, I did comment on it even if they closed it....

Comment:

Sorry: TOTAL FAIL. Declaring this a 'feature' is a complete snow job.

Our mission-critical sites are completely built around a custom landing page for the team, not a limited dashboard, and totally dependent on having the page tree displayed, concisely, in the sidebar under a set of customized links and sometimes in a specific order.

Similarly, our enterprise documentation navigation is heavily dependent on having the page trees. And, yes, I encourage our users to employ the search to find things, but even that is made much less convenient in the "new Confluence experience" due to the loss of the search box that you could just click into and start typing.

Your UI "redesign" is total manure, visually and functionally.

Since this change would break all of our mission sites (self-hosted) we'll likely just stop paying for maintenance on them since we'll never upgrade to this fertilizer.

Dear SUPPORTAt least do one favor! See the picture above. In the breadcrumbs at the top of the page, today if I click on the space name, I am taken to the "overview" page of the space that is meticulously crafted by me as admin. With the new experience, it will take me to "pages" that will just show me a list of pages! Please don't do this. Please at least give us ability to gracefully go to the space overview from anywhere! PLEASE!

We are indeed aware of this pain some customers are experiencing with the page tree not being there on Overview pages.

Because we are listening, we have decided to extend the period customers can opt in and out of the new experience and we will only be bringing customers back into the new experience by default (with no option to opt out) in mid September.

Taking this time means two things:

1) More time for you to adjust and learn the new experience, train your team, etc.

2) More time for us to address issues like this one. We are working through this and trying to find the right balance of solutions with you - our customers - at top of mind.

I apologize if the feeling has been that you have been ignored. The team (me included) are working through improving the experience every single day and are reading through everything including these threads. Your voices are not unheard, even if not every single request is fullfilled. We are taking this time to respond and ACT on your feedback, I will soon give an update about what exactly it is we are improving/bringing back etc.

Thanks @Liron for breaking the deafening silence! I for one had used every possible option (Commuity posts, Support tickets, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and direct messages to founders) to no avail.

Apart from page tree, there is issue with breadcrumbs CONFCLOUD-56869 that needs to be addressed. Also, if you can find a creative way to facilitate landing on one's favorite space by default, that would be great.

Sorry you've been feeling like there has been a silence. There surely isn't one! we have been active on all community posts - perhaps this one is really the one with the least Atlassian-ism on it - apologies for this.

This issue is under technical review as you can see, and as Ran Ding replied earlier to you directly, so it is about to be deployed to production.

I have seen the ticket you raised around user settings for setting a site home, this feature has now been deprecated, as it is hardly used and can be achieved in other means in the product or otherwise. Please mark your favourite space as favourite by adding it to your spaces to have quick access to it always.

Also, your admin can set any space as site home for everyone - although I realise this is not what you're after.

With such a big design overhaul some features are always likely to be deprecated, while other better features will come up as well - this is the purpose we're doing this. Again, your feedback does NOT go unnoticed and we have spoken about this in our team and we shall re consider this in the future again if the need arises.

Please make sure to keep raising feedback like you are doing because this helps us understand you better.

Really appreciate your response Liron, and truly understand the predicament where some features get depracated! However - sometimes one wonders why some trivial (but extremely non-intuitive) changes are made inspite of the huge user backlash. I am alluding to "Favorites" being rebranded as "Save for later"! It is hard to understand why would one change nomenclature that is not only industry standard, but also has easy recall, to something as ambiguous as "Save for later" - which smacks of "work in progress" flavor! Anyway, it was great to let off some steam knowing someone is listening! :)

Normally changes like this would be mediated and managed by internal IT departments rather than having everyone show up for work one day and everything is different. People REALLY don't like that. You guys seem to be more focused on shipping features than you are on delivering value. Value means the customer is ready and able to use the features you are delivering. You need to get your priorities straight.

All our customers have been emailed (the admins) announcing this change. We have also blogged about it, and announcned it at the last Atlassian Summit.

Still, I am well aware that most users would not have known about it beforehand.

In the cloud world this works a bit differently to the server world, fortunately or not I guess.

I do apologize that this has hit you by surprise, but this is also why we have the option to opt out, user based. So each user can decide if they want to learn this now - or later. I do believe that many other cloud tools that change do so without telling us their customers first, and sometimes even without an opt out option.

It is a lesson for the future though to be even more "loud" about upcoming change, but frankly the only way to really introduce the change for real is to ship it (I mean, if I blogged about this earlier how much would that have helped as opposed to ACTUALLY experiencing the change in product?).

Food for thought - but we are learning and improving always, just like any other team in the world.

Abhay, the definition of 'huge user backlash' is probably different in our worlds. I have not heard a single voice regarding the 'save for later' wording. If this is indeed confusing please let us know, and I will let our IX team know as well. We would like our products to be clear and for them to help you do your best work - so if wording of something isn't clear - its great feedback for us.

:) Agreed the "huge user backlash" was kind of overdone! But, seriously, draft sounding "Save for later" is no patch on industry standad "Favourite". In fact the macro that shows "saved for later" pages (mercifully) retains the "Favourite Pages" as name! Do reconsider reverting to "favorite".

This must be one of my worst "facepalm" moments - however, when everywhere in Confluence "saved" pages are being referred to as "favourite pages" - then I hope you would agree that the "Saved for later" is hugely confusing! Attaching screen shot of the macro.

+1 on Abhay's take that the literal takeaway on 'Save for Later' sounds like saving a draft (indeed,that's exactly what I assumed it meant when I first saw it), and why introduce any confusion. The oldie-but-goodie term, Favorites would be more intuitively understood by more people imho, and as a bonus is less words and less letters!

Thanks to Atlassian team for your responses. I just wanted to add one note:

The fact that users can "opt-out" is irrelevant on an externally-facing page.

We use Confluence for our online help docs. We don't expect our visitors to understand how to create accounts or do anything more complicated with the UI than clicking on simple links in a readable navigation. By hiding the page tree and throwing in a blog link that points nowhere, this update effectively broke our help docs for our users. To put it plainly, "users can opt out" is not really an answer to "the update broke everything" because it doesn't apply to a pretty significant class of "users."

We're now evaluating whether it makes more sense to redesign the site entirely and keep it on Confluence using the "Instant Websites" integration, or whether we just need to move to a different product altogether. Honestly, that's not meant to sound like an angry threat, but as what I hope will be helpful feedback. As the guy in charge of collecting feedback from users at my own company, I'd want to know if I had to tell my supervisors, "we forgot about a significant use case and it may well cost us some paying customers."

If the takeaway here is that Confluence Cloud isn't really suitable for use as externally-facing help documentation, though, please do let me know. We got set up with Confluence because we were already happy with JIRA and we'd heard this would be a good solution for integrated help docs, but I don't want to pester anybody for features or consideration if the product just isn't meant to be used for what we need.

Wow.Sometimes I wonder whether Atlassian is looking askance at such huge insights shared here! But I do believe all is not lost, as deomonstrated by @Liron who has been empathetically addressing issues.It is never too late!

Jason : your comments strongly reinforce the point I've made elsewhere in these threads that the "new Confluence experience" design changes have BROKENcritical use cases that many customers have come to depend on and have invested large resources in using.

In our organization we don't have they cycles to rework our cloud site in the near future - fortunately, our mission critical stuff is all on self-hosted server sites. Unless things change, we'll probably never upgrade those...

You mentioned two issues that are now basically going against your use case of using Conflunece:

1) Not having a page tree when on Overview.

2) Not being able to get rid of "Blogs" in specific spaces.

#1 has been discussed all around the community with some other users too, not sure if you have seen my replies but basically I hope it reassures you to know that we do want to support this use case as well, and there is an initiative in place for Confluence this year for addressing the different use cases smartly (to put in perspective, there are many other use cases of Confluence that actually require the page tree to NOT be there on overview, and overview being a central piece for a space). This will be addressed.

#2 Is a shorter term solution which is bringing back the ability to customize the sections in your space (in the sidebar effectively) and we are actively working on this.

Thanks for your reply, @Liron. Those are indeed the two concerns that prompted us to step up our schedule for either reskinning or replacing Confluence Cloud. Since you ask, though, we did have another concern already that the latest update also made more urgent: The mobile version of the site went from "hard to use" to "hard to use and also annoying."

Previously, visiting our Confluence site in a mobile browser brought the visitor to a special mobile version of the site without any way at all to see the page tree or other navigation (at least that we could find). We considered adding page tree macros to every page on the site, but found that these macros were invisible on mobile. The only way to navigate that we found was by typing into the search field.

Now, there is no mobile site – visiting on a mobile browser simply brings you to the desktop version of the page. This is extremely hard to get around on a phone, but at least the page tree is there (if you know where to find it). More problematic, though, is the fact that visitors who are not logged in repeatedly get spammed with a login prompt as they go from page to page, forcing them to repeatedly hit "cancel." Again, this is particularly problematic with the use case of an externally-facing site that does not expect visitors to create accounts or log in.

Hi Jason - the login prompt that your users are encountering definitely sounds like a bug, and one that we want to investigate further. I'd like to find out the details of your instance - not sure if you'd be comfortable posting your domain here? Or logging this bug as a support issue?

Hi @caroline - Our help documentation is at virzoom.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/help (which we forward to from virzoom.com/support). I encountered the repeated login prompts by visiting in Safari on iOS. I hit "cancel" every time. It came up I'm guessing 4-5 times before it stopped prompting me, though it's not clear to me whether that's because it got the hint or because I started visiting different sorts of pages on the site. I hope this helps!

My organisation is in a similar situation to @Jason Tocci – we use Confluence for our online help and we don’t want users to have to do anything other than clicking on links to take them to a page. And we are asking the same question about the suitability of Confluence for our external facing documentation. So it would be nice to get some direction from Atlassian in this regard so we can decide if Confluence is going to continue to meet our requirements.

A few other points I’d like to raise:

Ann Worley mentioned that the Page Tree is still there under “Pages”. Yes it’s there, the problem is this gives a pretty messy view of the page tree (well at least in our case it does, with multiple instances of “User icon” text in the “Contributors” column). As we use Confluence for our online help, our users don’t need to know who’s contributed, they just need to get to the page which gives them the details they need.

While there was plenty of notification from Atlassian about the “new look” I can’t remember seeing anything about the “no opting out” for non-logged in users. So this caught us off-guard and we couldn’t warn our users before they got a new look online help. Myself and my colleagues could opt out if we weren’t ready for the new look Confluence but our users didn’t have the same option.

We used to have a few “Space Shortcuts” that were always shown (so users could quickly go back to a few main pages). This has been lost with the inability to customise the sidebar.

(And Jason, thanks for mentioning the “Instant Websites” plugin, we’ll look into that as an option for our external Confluence pages.)

Thanks for bringing these points up, @Lucy Minato. I noticed these too but forgot to mention them. The "contributors" thing feels weird when it's almost always just me writing the pages – why give something that's identical on almost every page such priority screen real estate? – but it didn't even occur to me how much more intrusive it'd look with more contributors.

@Liron - why can't Atlassian demonstrate it's customer-centricity by graciously holding back the "new experience"? It's never too late when it comes to customers! The outpouring of insights and usecases from veteran loyal users is priceless - leverage it to make the new experience truly outstanding! (BTW, just wondering is there anyone else from "product management" watchig this thread?)

Hi@Abhay Patil - I'm a product manager with the Confluence team, and yes I've been watching this thread, along with other PMs from Confluence :) The feedback from the Community is important to us, as well as useful.

We are continuing to work on the new experience and are aiming to make it truly outstanding. We do have to make tough decisions about where we spend our efforts though - to be as honest as possible, the sooner we ship the new experience to everyone, the sooner we can dedicate the entirety of our efforts to improving the new version (rather than supporting the old version).

This post seems to have gotten a lot of attention. While the majority of comments in this thread are related to the "new Confluence experience" that hit our desks last month, please keep in mind that the root of the problem is the abuse of your Cloud users with constant changes to the live application.

I actually consider this to be an abuse of the DevOps methodologies that are enabling this to happen - its interesting to see an application become difficult to use because of "over-releasing".

The funny thing is, contrary to what DevOps advocates ("more releases, faster time to value") what I'm seeing here is that users don't actually want any of these kind of incremental changes.

In reality, they aren't providing us with any value, we are just getting burned. What we want is for the button to be in the same place the next day.

So who's value is it? The product and engineering teams that get to check off another box and close another epic, probably... Not us. For us, the users, you are actually reducing value with these constant changes.

I actually don't have a big issue with the big UI you dropped on us, its that your CD pipline is becoming a bigger nuisance for me than any issue I have with the application itself.

You guys should really think about this, and if you want to talk about it drop me an email, its in my profile.

And @caroline: Please don't insult the community with phrases like "to be as honest as possible, the sooner we ship the new experience to everyone, the sooner we can dedicate the entirety of our efforts to improving the new version". That's double-speak for "you try it out and help us debug it".

We're not here to do your work for you. Find yourselves a representative focus or testing group and ask them for their help. As for the rest of us, we have other work to do. And we certainly have never, ever been asked whether we have the time, energy or inclination to help debug a product that we're actually paying for!

@Till Noever: I debated yesterday on whether or not to comment on that response, so thanks for doing it. I really hope that those were the sentiments of one person and not the company as a whole. To me those comments are a firable offense or at the very least, removing that person's ability to interact with the customers.

@caroline: Maybe this wasn't your intent, but your comments came across as extremely arrogant. It basically said, we don't care about our customer base, we are going do what we want no matter how negatively it impacts our users.

@Sandy Johnson - I think it was a classic case of choice of wrong expression, and surely not the intent. What had me in splits was the turn of phrase "to be as honest as possible" - that was almost a confession of trace of dishonesty, but surely you did not mean that @caroline! :)

Want to ask a question again because I didn’t get an answer the first time (and still need the answer!). This seems like a good place to do it because Confluence Product Managers have been reading this and getting involved (which has been good).

Q: Can we get some direction from Atlassian as to the future of Confluence Cloud so we can make some decisions about what we use, in particular for our external-facing documentation? We need to be thinking about this now (i.e. last week/month), before we end up with too many confused/annoyed users. I believe others who have posted in this discussion are in the same boat.

Yes we’ve signed up for Confluence Cloud and we understand what that gives us (versus Confluence Server). But if this is the way Confluence Cloud will continue, both in terms of the new UI and the constant changes to the live application, can you let us know so we can (re)assess the suitability of the product for our varied uses? Please ...